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mathgenius

11,329 karma · joined May 1, 2009

Email me simon at arrowtheory.com Cheers.
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mathgenius··on Chicago O'Hare digs up 50-ton boulder under airfield, asks public for name ideas
They should name it after this guy, the Pitelka rock.
mathgenius··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
the transition ... to domination by our new AI overlords?
mathgenius··on Small Models Have Arrived
Can we stick one of these in something that looks and sounds like HAL 9000 ?
mathgenius··on Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division
And very creepy too. I loved it.
mathgenius··on Ask HN: How to decide if a house is the right fit?
Keep looking!
mathgenius··on Facebook's Little Red Book
People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.
mathgenius··on Understanding Google's Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough
Yes, and it's worth pointing out these examples because they don't work as quantum memories. Two more: magnetic memory based on magnets which are magnetic because they are build from many tiny (atomic) magnets, all (mostly) in agreement. Optical storage is similar, much like parent's example of a signal being slowly sent over a wire.

So the next question is why doesn't this work for quantum information? And this is a really great question which gets at the heart of quantum versus classical. Classical information is just so fantastically easy to duplicate that normally we don't even notice this, it's just too obvious a fact... until we get to quantum.

mathgenius··on C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte
Ternary computers have 8 tits to a byte.
mathgenius··on From Sets to Categories (2023)
This is likely the same as a distributive law of monads... https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/distributive+law on good days i might understand this stuff..

Another less high-brow connection: associativity of matrix multiplication relies on the usual distributivity law..

mathgenius··on What's the Deal with the Industrial Revolution
Can we add caffeine as a cause? It was introduced in england around 1650 and then a few decades of people getting high from that and voila, steam power!
mathgenius··on People Don't Understand OOP
For me objects capture some notion of invariants in data that would otherwise just be a bunch of variables. This is usually indicated by functions that act on the data maintaining the invariants. Those functions are the methods.

I get that many people either don't see, or don't place much importance on the invariants of their data and so they are happy writing functions and even get annoyed by people and their over use of objects. Maybe these people are just way smarter than me; I definitely need objects/classes to help me organize my code.

mathgenius··on Benjamín Labatut Will Not Be Profiled
> But no one seems to listen to me.

just buy it and give it to people.. that's how i came across this book & already i bought a copy for a friend.

mathgenius··on Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights smoother
Yeah I'm guessing these poles just get out in front of the wing aerodynamics enough that they can sense whats going on with the air so that air pockets/turbulence can be predicted. Either that or we are missing a decimal place, maybe they mean 10 milliseconds?
mathgenius··on We don't have senior engineers anymore
I don't think it's possible for a packer to become a mapper. We're talking about a strategy (being a packer) with some deep seated emotional roots. They have probably been at it since age 3. Rather than trying to turn them into a mapper, better to find what they are actually good at.
mathgenius··on The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This has got me inspired again about my own history project. It is so easy nowadays to go back to original sources and unearth these hidden or forgotten narratives... and then return to tell these stories in a way that gives another point of view on our current day. Thankyou to the author of this article!
mathgenius··on How to be successful as a research mathematician? Follow your gut
That's about how to solve problems, but to do research you need to find good problems, and that turns out to be more important, imo. How do you pick "major problem X" anyway? This strategy from Tao just leads to incremental results...
mathgenius··on Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?
Yeah, this is actually a great way to explain the gate synthesis problem in a quantum computer, it's like solving a high dimensional rubik's cube !
mathgenius··on My Meeting with David Bohm
There certainly is a cultural division, but maybe there is no fundamental distinction to be made. Both art and science help us make sense of the world. They both tell stories, about an apparently objective reality. They both excite and inspire, and enable us to transcend a limited point-of-view.
mathgenius··on We're afraid language models aren't modeling ambiguity
Galois theory is an inherent part of language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2568

mathgenius··on Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)
The answer to these questions is the Riemann hypothesis. John Baez just wrote a related paper about "motives" for beginners (undergrads?) [1]. It's worth a read even if you squint at the equations like i do, there's plenty of interesting commentary as well.

[1] https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/motives.pdf

mathgenius··on A new kind of symmetry shakes up physics
Yeah, it's a reference to how "category theory" generalizes "group theory". So if transformations in a group are called "symmetries" then you might call the transformations in a category "generalized symmetries" or "non-invertible symmetries" as in this article.
mathgenius··on Keep your AI claims in check
> Deterministic if/then statements

This was the pinnacle of AI in the 80's. They called them "expert systems".

mathgenius··on Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
Part of this I would attribute to the general collapse of western civilization that we seem to be witnessing. I think it helps to recognize this is what is happening.

As for exchanges, I would recommend Bitstamp [1]. It is the oldest crypto exchange & never been hacked (that i know of). The original owners sold out a few years ago, but it's still going rock-solid.

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/

mathgenius··on Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
The fee is the y-intercept, and the exchange rate is the slope. These businesses make money by manipulating either or bother of these numbers.
mathgenius··on Ask HN: What’s your way to get rid of a hangover?
Vitamin-B in liquid form.
mathgenius··on The Zen anti-interpretation of quantum mechanics (2021)
I like the many-interpretations interpretation of quantum. It says that you should believe all of them, or rather, choose a different interpretation based on your mood. For the optimistic, it's many-worlds. If you are going out tonight & hoping to get lucky, it better be Copenhagen. If you are falling into despair then it's going to be superdeterminism for you.
mathgenius··on Legoland bond crisis threatens South Korea's economy
Patrick Boyle on youtube is pretty good on this kind of thing. And the guy has just about the driest sense of humour i've ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle

mathgenius··on Why mathematicians study knots
John Baez has written a lot about this stuff. Try this: https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340 . There's also his TWF column.
mathgenius··on Why mathematicians study knots
The article seems to be implying that mathematicians study knots because there's lots of fun to be had. This is partly true, but there's other more profound reasons. For example: higher dimensional algebra. The "usual" algebra is just one dimensional, but people have noticed that in many cases this is just a projection (shadow) of higher dimensional systems, where the symbols can interact in more than just a linear direction. And once you get to three dimensions hey presto your algebra can get knotted!
mathgenius··on The Geometry Junkyard
I think "higher dimensional algebra" is some kind of attempt at doing this. String diagrams (for tensor networks) is one example. John Baez has written about this stuff.
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